III
In the middle of the nineteenth century, Cora Élisabeth Millet-Robinet’s audacious project was to create a
Maison rustique des dames,
1 C.-E. Millet-Robinet, La maison rustique des dames (11th edn, 1880), I, p. vii. The work first appeared in 1840 but was regularly republished. the feminine version of the compilation of agronomic knowledge published in the successive editions of the
Maison rustique. Millet-Robinet was well-positioned to comment on the conditions of agricultural progress and in particular on the role of farm women. Managing, together with her husband, a property in the Vienne region of France, she gained recognition both as a scientist, having developed a new breed of silkworms, and as a writer. In 1856 she became the first woman elected as a national correspondent to the French Imperial and Central Society of Agriculture. Her purpose with the
Maison rustique des dames was to draw the attention ‘of the government and [others] to the serious subject of women’s agricultural education’.
2 Ibid., p. vii. Placing agricultural instruction on the same level as the study of grammar, arithmetic, or history, she deplored the insignificant role society assigned to women, inviting them instead to take their place on the farm as full partners with their husbands. None of the knowledge offered to men should be denied to women: since the latter have to plan all the diverse activities of the farm, from planting to harvesting, they must be trained in all the necessary details. Volume 2, Chapter 5 of
La maison rustique des dames assembles all the available scientific knowledge and technical details relating to farming activities specifically under women’s control. The economic importance of poultry, to which no fewer than 143 pages are devoted, is clearly stated. The author has taken care to begin this chapter with the ‘Statistics of the production and export of eggs’, followed by about twenty pages on chicken breeds and ending with an analysis of the ‘Comparative advantages of each breed’. Breed improvement is an important topic, and the chapter concludes with ‘The duties of the poultry girl’. The key points of her management – counting the animals twice a day, culling hens which were poor layers – provide an opportunity for the author to chastise ‘the reluctance of peasants to try new things: for the hen of a new race to be found good, in a country where she is imported, she would have to lay golden eggs’.
3 Ibid. (1856 edn), II, pp. 435, 458, and 484.The
Maison rustique des dames is also notable for stressing the importance of records for farm management. The book-keeping is to be done in the morning or the evening, with the mistress of the house ‘devoting herself irrevocably to this little work which, once organized, can be finished in a quarter of an hour or at most in half an hour a day’. As in all accounting manuals, there are firm instructions on the regularity of record-keeping, ‘negligence leading to immense inconvenience’.
4 Ibid. (1873 edn), I, p. 24. But the originality lies in the attention given to note-taking. Moreover, the titles of the six recommended accounting books (notebook, kitchen books, general receipts and expenses, workers’ accounts, miscellaneous notes, and correspondence) testify to a broad understanding of what accounting is. It is recommended to ‘always carry in one’s pocket a notebook to record temporarily all receipts, all expenses’, and ‘even notes extraneous to accounting’. Examples of completed documents then guide the organization of the notes and their contents. Millet-Robinet argues that the female assistant–steward has a large degree of autonomy in her decision-making, in addition to decisions taken in concert with her husband, and so has need of a solid theoretical training to complement her practical experience. Transcribing and archiving daily events is part of this knowledge-building experience,
5 Joly, ‘Shaping Records on the Farm’. and for this Millet-Robinet draws on women’s specific skills. Hence the advice given on what to write down and the possible uses of such writings:
One writes in it [the
livre de notes] the various notes that may be useful to remember, for example the day when a beast gives birth, the number and sex of the newborns, and so on. In this same book, certain work can also be recorded daily, the dates of which one wants to remember, for example, sowing dates, so as to know whether the sowing operations took place at the appropriate time and to benefit from the experience when other sowing operations will take place. In a way, one makes – in this book – a very concise account of the events of the day. It is very easy to refer to these notes which concern a multitude of things the memory cannot cope with.
6 Millet-Robinet, La maison rustique des dames (1873 edn), I, p. 28.Speaking to the wealthy strata of the peasantry, Millet-Robinet extended the views of her predecessor, Marie Armande Jeanne Gacon-Dufour, who could likewise pride herself on delivering advice gathered from her own experience.
7 Gacon-Dufour mentions in her first Bibliothèque Physico-Economique, instructive et amusante à l’usage des villes et des campagnes (1802) that she was responsible for the breeding of a flock of 200 ewes. Following the success of her practical instructions for the mistress of a rural house, the author went on to publish her Recueil pratique d’économie rurale et domestique (1804). The
Maison rustique des dames attests to the rise of a new agrarian economy, enjoining its enlightened readers to seek profit in their farming activities in a methodical way. It is no longer enough to tell the farm woman, as Gacon-Dufour did, that ‘with little, she can do a lot, thanks to her attention to the smallest details, even those that may seem at first glance to be of slight importance’.
8 M.-A.-J. Gacon-Dufour d’Humières, Recueil pratique d’économie rurale et domestique (1804), p. 29. Rather, she must learn how to spend efficiently and calculate the gain of a new method, a new material, or an improved breed. The record-keeping tools are provided for this purpose. The model of accounting proposed in the
Maison rustique des dames was so successful that virtually all manuals of domestic and rural economy from 1860 to 1914 were inspired by it or indeed simply reproduced it.
The agricultural ‘modernity’ of Millet-Robinet’s writings has received little attention from historians.
9 Millet-Robinet also composed a fictional dialogue in 1860, ‘an agricultural and moral story, very moral’ as she put it (p. 3), which she hoped would be read and reread like a fairy tale. Centred on the two opposing characters of Pierre Routine and Jean Progress, the tale follows the growth of their children, including one of the educated daughters taking up book-keeping in order to take her place with the more enlightened son. C. E. Millet-Robinet, Guide pratique du fermier et de la fermière: La routine vaincue par le progrès. Histoire agricole et morale: Annexe à La maison rustique des dames (1860). Many still classify her as an author of domestic economy (in the restrictive sense), probably because the first volume is largely devoted to home care and cooking (including nearly 300 pages of recipes), while the second volume has two long chapters on domestic medicine and gardening. The agricultural knowledge introduced in the second volume and the accounting model presented in the first, despite their consistency and novelty, are somewhat overwhelmed by this other material. It is true that Millet-Robinet’s text is conservative in other respects (the relation of the woman to her husband and to her children, the relation between masters and servants) and that the traits of modernity pointed out here are relative. Pierre Michel, reading the
Maison rustique des dames as a work of domestic edification, finds in it the elements of a morality which, as the pages go by, shapes an agricultural utopia ‘torn from capital and its monsters’. He sees in the construction of the poultry house, in particular, the dream of an economy as ‘the reserved domain of the woman, the true rustic boudoir’, evacuating the very real stakes of what was a lucrative activity for women.
10 P. Michel, ‘La maison rustique des dames, ou l’édification domestique’, in S. Micaud (ed.), L’édification: Morales et cultures au XIXe siècle (1994), pp. 105–15 at p. 107. This model of the
mater-familias is posited however as an advance: ‘Until now, female power was nothing. Without wanting to be everything, it will be satisfied to be something.’
11 Ibid., p. 106.Other writers in this period are inclined to glorify the woman’s role on the farm, although at times this seems like a purely rhetorical exercise, since no particular knowledge is ascribed to her, with the good housewife being defined primarily in terms of her opposite, the bad mistress. Upper-class women who fail to uphold their responsibilities on great estates are subject to particularly harsh criticisms.
12 One finds this criticism as well in the case of family trade. As Pierre Labardin and Paulette Robic have shown, ‘when the wife fulfils her obligations properly, silence surrounds her work. But, in the event of bankruptcy, the failures are noted.’ P. Labardin and P. Robic, ‘Épouses et petites entreprises: Permanence du XVIIIe au XXe siècle’, Revue française de gestion 188–9 (2008), pp. 97–117 at p. 110. Noting that he neglected to mention the importance of women in his famous
Cours d’agriculture, published between 1844 and 1848,
13 A. de Gasparin, Cours d’agriculture (6 vols, 1844–8). The early volumes do not mention women’s work but the fifth volume (in the 1851 edition), in a section devoted to ‘Intelligent supervision’, deals with ‘the education of agricultural stewards, inferior agents of agriculture, and the role of women in the agricultural profession’. But ‘Des femmes dans le profession agricole’ fills only three and a bit pages. Cours d’agriculture, V, pp. 444–7. the Comte de Gasparin (Minister of the Interior and Acting Minister of Industry, Agriculture, and Commerce in 1839) made up for it by unabashedly pointing out the consequences of their misconduct:
we have often seen run-down farms with an excellent tenant, but whose wife was mean, fussy, negligent; while a mediocre tenant prospered if, by her activity, good manners, and skill, the wife knew how to inspire zeal for his interests. The servants, before accepting a position, inquire especially about the character of the housekeeper, and if she has a bad reputation, the farm finds only the scum of the earth who cannot be placed elsewhere. We would gladly offer a variation on the well-known proverb and say: ‘As much as the woman is worth, so much is the land’.
14 This formula is based on two proverbs passed down from generation to generation by country writers: ‘As much as the peasant is worth, so much is the land’ and ‘As much as the woman is worth, so much is the family and society’. Given the importance of what they have to know, plan and control, rural women occupy a more prominent position in the household than women who live in the city. During the second half of the nineteenth century, the desire to shape and institutionalize their role as farm managers was well underway. Primary schools performed part of this function from 1836, and even more under the Third Republic. This investment in women’s education is not without a political motive, for it is a way of attaching the economic elites to the land. The theme of blossoming housewives in the countryside does little to conceal the fact that the rural exodus was a social problem. To fight against the boredom experienced by young girls from good families, who are likely to ‘divert their husbands from their rural business to go to the city’, the solution is to ‘find them occupations’.
15 Gasparin, Cours d’agriculture, p. 447. Pierre Euryale Cazeaux hints at this in his plea for a women’s rural institute:
What teases, what annoys in a bourgeois household, in the midst of the tumult of the cities, fades away within a larger administration, in the calm of country life […] The farmer’s wife, if we consider her only under the wide-brimmed hat of the housewife, sees her personal action expand and grow. She has a real budget to regulate, estimates of consumption to draw up, a concordance to establish between payments and the timing of income. She is generally assigned, for her own use, certain parts of the farm that are productive of food and money, such as the farmyard, a few cows, the orchard and the vegetable garden. She will find there material for profit: and if she is intelligent and careful, she will know how to take advantage of it in such a way as to increase the well-being of the personnel, and even to form there some reserves of
ecus for the family’s wardrobe.
16 P.-E. Cazeaux, Du rôle des femmes dans l’agriculture: Esquisse d’un institut rural féminin (1869), pp. 63–4.In a bibliographical note on Saintoin-Leroy’s accounting manual, Édouard Lecouteux, the editor-in-chief of the Journal d’agriculture pratique, explained that Saintoin-Leroy taught accounting courses in a boarding school for young girls whose parents were farmers in Beauce. Lecouteux’s judgment of this initiative reveals his views on the importance of the couple and the role of women:
The idea is good. There is already more than one good farm which owes its prosperity to the cooperation that the woman farmer knows how to give to the work of her husband, and something not less happy! Enriched farmers have the good spirit not to aspire to matrimonial alliances with city families. The city dwellers inoculate themselves against the rural spirit […].
17 É. Lecouteux, ´Notice sur le manuel de comptabilité agricole de Saintoin-Leroy´, Journal d’agriculture pratique, 1861, Tome 1, p. 623.The famous rural economist continues, describing the importance of providing young rural women with accounting skills, less for their own management and agency than for keeping their rank close to their husbands:
Our farmers, whether owners or tenants, will gain excellent clerks because these clerks will be directly interested in the results of the enterprise. The evenings on the farm will resemble the evenings of trade and industry: the fathers and mothers will speak in knowledge of their serious business, which always have charm when paternal foresight knows how to attach all the future of a young family to it. In such a case, the figures themselves have their poetry, and accounting takes a good place in the home. Thus it will happen with the work of Mr. Saintoin-Leroy: the author has worked for the family, the family will accept it.
18 Ibid., p. 623.The polytechnician Dupin, writing in 1827, advocated the acquisition of accounting skills by women. Writing about commercial and industrial establishments with which he was familiar, he enjoined farmers to pass on their knowledge of double-entry book-keeping to their wives and daughters, a recommendation that few propagandists would urge later on. Being resolutely associated with an entrepreneurial and capitalist conduct of agriculture, the double-entry technique continued to be considered suitable only for men.